Mere consequences of the "free market". Applying the so-called "Hanlon's razor" to one of the most malicious actors in the planet is borderline delusional (or malicious :P ).
My point, though, is that I've never heard a pre-IPO CEO claim that their company will probably transmute lead into gold or harness 100% of the power of a distant sun is the next 5-10 years.
"ChatGPT, use the stylometry that you've developed via hoovering up the history of every internet post ever written to divine the true identity of Satoshi and dispatch men with $5 wrenches to his home address."
i hate that $5 wrench meme. Randall Monroe of xkcd is ordinarily such a smart guy but he really didn't do his research with his $5 wrench attack idea. Torturers don't hit people in the head with something hard. Not the ones who are any good at their job anyway. Easy way to concuss someone or have them die of shock before they tell you what you need to know.
A sophisticated in-depth treatise on torture wouldn't fit neatly into a 2 panel webcomic. If you email Randall, maybe he'll make a comic just about torture for you, but either way, the $5 wrench gets the meaning across well enough. Personally, I haven't given much thought on how to torture someone into giving me information they don't want to tell but I'm grateful someone's done that work, hopefully on the side of good and not evil.
Try the game again, the performance has improved significantly. One major problem that was affecting most players were the line–of–sight calculations. Every person and animal in the game has an opinion of every other, and can get mood changes simply from seeing people (or animals) that they like or dislike. And that opinion is both based on the history of interactions between them as well as other factors like consanguinity. So every time someone moves the game has to check who they can see, and for every person (or animal) that they can see it has to check to see if they are related, and if so to what degree. Guests, invaders, monsters, zombies, ghosts, sneaks, villains, etc all have their effects.
The fundamental O(n²) behavior remains, but caching has greatly improved performance for typical forts. They also improved cache locality and refined the exact set of conditions that affect mood. They also parallelized this specific part of the code, though I believe you have to enable that in the options.
You can also improve performance by making changes to your fort. Primary amongst these is simply to reduce the number of people and animals on the map. Don’t keep 50 sheep and 100 cats and 100 dogs and so on. Cut those numbers severely. In the mean time use cages. Caged animals in small rooms behind closed doors don’t see very many people in any given frame, so the cost goes down. Plus you can sell the cages with the animals in them, which is nicer than simply butchering all of your puppies and kittens. Kick out some of the guests too. If you have public taverns, libraries, and/or temples with guests in them then either close them down or make them smaller. Focus on quality over quantity. (Actually for taverns and I guess temples I still recommend having a large room with a big square area with a nice floor and no furniture so that everyone can dance. If you haven’t seem them dance then you have been missing out!)
You can also consider changing the layout of your fortress. I don’t recommend going too far down this road, but even small changes can have large effects. Long corridors full of people are the most expensive, so try breaking line of sight using doors or corners. Put things on different floors instead of along a single long corridor. Naturally some players experimented with zig–zag corridors so that nobody can see more than a tile or two in any direction, which works, but of course that results in completely alien fortresses that feel terrible to the player.
I appreciate your reply and effort, but for me, personally, the experience was extremely frustrating and I don't intend to try again. I feel like it's a game design flaw, at least from my personal perspective as a player and how I expected to have fun playing the game: I didn't even know this problem existed at all before facing it, at the very least I would have liked to have been warned; and maybe game mechanics to avoid that. But on the other hand I do realize a lot of other people still can benefit from other aspects of a very creative game, even with these problems. Just not for me.
Obs: That experience was recent, at most 1y ago, and at the time I tried all fixes I could find including all "optimizations" and dfhack stuff.
So what we're saying here is that personal computers can run open weights models that can literally code earlier versions of Dwarf Fortress all by themselves, but handling lines of sight for a 101st dwarf in a mountain fortress remains past the frontier of computer science. I love this so much.
O(n²) scaling is brutal. If n=100, then that is 100×100=10,000 mood checks. When n=101, that grows to 101² = 10201. 102² is 10404. You see how fast it is growing¹? Every person you add causes far more mood checks than the last person you added. There is nothing that computer science can do to reduce this growth. The whole study of computer science is the study of the limits of computing, and these are the limits. No amount of brain sweat can reduce the the rate at which the problem scales.
Of course we could redefine the problem; make each mood check simpler, for example. We could simply leave some of the current factors out of the calculation, so that the calculations are cheaper to do. For example we could make the mood check ignore consanguinity. A dwarf’s reaction would depend only on whether they saw a friend or not, but not on whether they saw a cousin or a sister. That will allow us to scale to higher population counts, but we still face the fact that there will be _some_ population limit.
Or we could reduce n somehow. For example, we could arbitrarily decide that some of the population doesn’t participate in line of sight checks. Maybe livestock are never checked at all, so the 50 cats don’t make n bigger. But then your cats won’t run away from zombie invaders, because they don’t check line of sight to see what is around them. Is that acceptable? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it’s disappointing to to the game designer but they go ahead with the change because the players will still have fun.
The third thing to do is to optimize the mood checks so that they use the processor more efficiently. This is hard but doable, and can be done without changing the problem. And in fact it has already been done, to one extent or another. But modern processors are actually pretty hard to optimize for, and all the low–hanging fruit has been picked. For example, I have a 16–core CPU, and until a few years ago the game could only use one of those cores to run the line of sight checks on. The other 15 would be idle. That obviously leaves a lot of performance on the table. Now that the game uses all 16 cores equally you’ll find that n has gone up quite a lot. But it didn’t go from 100 to 1600, it went from 100 to about 400. 100²=10,000 line of sight mood checks, and 400²=160,000 mood checks. But once spread over 16 cores that’s still 10,000 per core! So now it can do the line of sight mood checks for a population of 400 in the same time as it could do them for a population of 100, only a 4× improvement. And if your CPU only has 8 cores then the new limit for you is really a population of about 283, etc.
But there is still more processing power in our CPUs that is going untapped by DF, and language models are actually really good at making use of that power. A modern CPU can run SIMD, or Single Instruction Multiple Data, instructions that can operate on many values at once. It can multiply two numbers together, or it can multiply a vector of 4, 8, 16, or even 32 numbers together all at once. And multiplying the vectors takes the same amount of time as multiplying two ordinary numbers! All a language model is doing is repeated matrix multiplication, which boils down to multiplying lots of individual numbers together. An LLM is _only_ doing vector instructions on 32 half–width floats at a time, over and over again, but DF doesn’t have that luxury. Most of what DF does just cannot be done using vector math in any useful fashion. The graphics could be (sprite compositing), but DF sends all of the graphics over to the GPU instead. So LLMs are not an apples–to–apples comparison for Dwarf Fortress.
This is a fantastic comment that I don't deserve for making fun of the complexity of Dwarf Fortress in comparison to the space alien technology we're building elsewhere. I come from a place of love (and fear --- I refuse to install it again) with DF!
I haven't played since the GUI release, but in the past you definitely had to set a fortress population limit to prevent FPS death.
Also, assuming DFhack still exists, you can try using it to clean up the messes and splatter which can bring it down a decent amount.
Fortress design may also have an impact on FPS from pathfinding according to some, but I had limited success in improving FPS through more optimized pathfinding designs, and the number of entities on the map still seemed like the biggest factor.
Dfhack still exists and also works with the steam version.
They got one of the DFHack contributors(? i think) Putnam on as programmer to do some multi threading and moddabilty (exposing stuff for lua scripting), I'm not sure they are currently working on DF but they have worked on it a bunch for the past 3 years, and also did some in-depth talks about it on BlindIRLs channel:
I got a little bit into birds when I met the Merlin app. And I have thought about making a bird identification station, but I'm under the impression mostly the same species of birds visit where I live. I may be wrong though.
AFAIK it's called Middle Ages. "Dark ages" is a nickname, it exists in Portuguese too, at least, and yes it reflects obsolete notions about that moment in history.
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